Coding By The Sea

I was recently asked to build out a piece of functionality that I had never done before - sending an automated email after filling out a form. To my surprise (but not really), Rails had this functionality already built in. In this blog post, we’re going to walk through setting up a basic mailer.

Test Driven Development, or “TDD”, is a software development process that relies on a ‘development cycle’ in order to implement a new software feature. This development cycle relies on 3 main phases, which can be broken down as follows:

I’m currently developing an expense upload portal, which in sum, allows a user to upload a receipt and receive an automated email of an expense spreadsheet in return. There are several major tasks required to make this flow work: uploading a document, extracting the pertinent data from the document, creating a new PDF, and sending this PDF via an automated email. I’d like to focus on one aspect that was surprisingly simple thanks to a Ruby Gem called “Prawn”, and that is PDF generation. Let’s start from the beginning:

As I dive deeper into learning C#, I can’t help but jump straight into coding in order to further my understanding of the language. I’ve taken to .NET Fiddle to try out some basics. Let’s look at a very basic, example which outlines how Interfaces, Classes, and Inheritance work in C#.